I watched this video by ColdFusion today, about what killed MySpace.

ColdFusion is pretty cool. He occasionally does these vids talking about why things are the way they are, and explaining things.

I think he's pretty much right...though perhaps he put too much emphasis on the problem with creepers on MySpace. I don't really remember that much at all back then, and I was a kid on MySpace. I'm sure it happened, because it's the internet, but I personally think it was likely just the news being the news.

What I think actually killed MySpace was lack of innovation and allowing the site to languish.

I didn't know about all the problems with the site being written in Cold Fusion (no relation to the YouTube channel), and then later switched to .Net, but I do know quite a bit about programming. I know for a fact that you could likely rewrite the entire MySpace site in a month or a bit longer, with the right coders.

Everyone knows these days that the internet is full of pervs. Or rather, the world is full of pervs. Tons of people want to show you their penis. Girls these days probably get more dick pics than they get actual conversation. When guys slide into your DM's these days, they use lube.

Of course, MySpace really sucked when it came to privacy controls and filters and such...but that just comes back to lack of innovation.

After MySpace was already falling into the black they tried multiple redesigns...but that's just slapping "lipstick on a pig".

Far too often, the people that own and run these sites and apps don't understand them at all. You can't have someone run something that doesn't understand it. It's just going to fail. It would be like a random person being put in charge of a store selling things that they know nothing about. The only chance they would have is if they poured themselves into it and learned everything they could about the business. But the people in charge of these companies don't do that.

MySpace still isn't that bad. It actually could be redesigned to be a better usable site that people might like...but you'd have to know what you were doing. It couldn't just be a redesign of the look and feel. You would have to consider, intelligently, how to redesign everything and improve it. You'd also have to deal with the fact that everyone would just assume MySpace sucks from the start.

Over the years I have seen the start of what caused the MySpace fall happen over and over again...though it doesn't always result in the complete failure of the app or site. Often they come to their sense eventually and update the site.

It's such a pervasive problem in the industry that sometimes I wonder how many coders are actually employed by sites. How many of them lay off their best coders, then just occasionally redesign their sites?

Netflix itself is sort of suffering from this problem. In many ways their site has actually lost a ton of functionality over the years.

If you've ever used the Crunchyroll app, you'd know that that thing has been half broken for years.

And see, that's what happens with these sites. Their owners ignore them and they don't get updated or their bugs fixed for months or even years...and people get tired of it.

It's not that Facebook was any better than MySpace...it was utter crap and still is, it's just that people got tired of it. People started thinking about MySpace as a clunky horrible site and the users just started abandoning it.

Steemit themselves did this for a while...and how many of their users left them for SteemPeak or another interface? Or even left Steem altogether? They completely ignored the bot and spam and shit posting problems...and then, as crypto crashed, everyone left.

Have we already undergone our own MySpace exodus due to a lack of intelligent innovation on Steemit's part?

Sites and apps are not end products. Any coder knows that a program is pretty much never "done". When you write something, you can bring it to a point where you can sell it, and people can use it, but if you are running a service, you can't just abandon it and expect it to keep going. You have to continually buff and polish it and carve out extra details if you expect people to continue to use it like they did when it was brand new. If you don't...someone else is gonna come along with something new...and it doesn't even matter if their thing is better, because by that time, they might be tired of all the issues with your service, such that they'll at least try the new thing.

This actually almost happened with Facebook itself, when Google+ came along, but then they fucked up themselves with a change early on enough that everyone abandoned them.

Running a site or an app is like running a great ship. You either have to continuously perform maintenance...or eventually it's going to sink. Or, at the very least, you have to occasionally do a complete overhaul once it becomes obvious it's falling apart. Of course, if you wait too long, you'll have to try extra hard to get your customers back, because you fucked up and lost them all.